Well, it's not one week of course - it's just that you'll probably reach your maximum daily in a week or two. You can then stay in top-100 for a month or more. There's only a few decent RPGs at a time, so #1 in a category means nothing - it can be as high as #1 in top-100 or not even there. It's not the most popular genre in the appstore by any means, but you can still do very nice like Gameloft did.
Happy medium here! First of all, I want to reiterate what everyone else has said about your game, Josh. It looks amazing and already has huge interest from the community, so I think you're going to do very well - much better than average. What has worked well for us personally is keeping costs low and having a good variety of apps, which means producing small casual games. This is now supporting us (family of 2) full time, and I think we'll be able to keep it going for a long time. But there are many ways to get there. I think you'll do very well Oh, and about the instability - sure, there are ups and downs. The key with the ups is to remember they don't last forever: Wrong - I made $1000 today! That means I'm going to make $365,000 this year! Time to buy a lamborghini!!! Right - I made $1000 today! That's $700 I can put in my savings account for when I'm making $30/day next month! But I've also found that after all the ups and downs and craziness have calmed down, every app has its equilibrium selling point. For some apps, the equilibrium is 0 copies for day. For some, it's 30/day. For some, it's 300/day. And then it can keep selling at that rate for a LONG time. So if you can create a few great apps, that will add up and you can have a great steady income from the App Store.
Natty, That's exactly the kind of info I was looking for. Is there a happy medium, and yes it sounds like there is. The happy medium is having plenty of Apps, which falls into our plan of releasing more of them early next year. I'm glad everything is working out well for you, and thanks for the praise! -Josh
For my lower selling games, I even think of it as what bill they will specifically pay for next month. Pentanimals doesn't sell much at all, but it does take care of my car payment each month. Even if you never have a breakout hit again, enough low-medium hits really adds up.
I still think the Indie Devs have a lot of advantages compared to the big boys. We can take more risk, and we have lower costs. Just look at what this depression has done to the industry. They had to lay off lots of people because they couldn't handle a bad year. That will make them even more risk averse. Due to the fickle nature and rock bottom prices of the app store, I don't think big companies will try to develop innovative titles. The advice others have given in this thread is spot on.
That would be good. I think a lot of us are interested in this topic and it would be great if you could post back after the release of your title and reflect on the topic yourself when you have some hard data!
lol - ok well I'm not sure how (exact) I'll get with the numbers, but I'll certainly say whether its doing awesome, good, ok, or bad. and if I seem like I'm in a good mood, you'll be able to figure it out
I'll chime in about medium success. We haven't revealed game sales information yet, but I can give you some clues on how well our games have done to help you out. Sparta was our top grossing game and we peaked at $4,000 in sales per day when it was in the Top 25. That isn't bad. However, it currently sales only 25-30 copies per day on a good day, so you can definitely see the lost momentum on income and sales. Champion Archer peaked at 500 sales per day for one week while it was featured. Currently only selling about 50 copies per day and has not providing a return on its initial investment. (Not profitable for the time it took to create.) Then we have our most recently released Swingaling. It was our attempt to enter the casual pick up and play market.... yeah... we sell about 1 copy per day of Swingaling with 4 weeks spent creating it... In my opinion, Ravensword will gross quite a bit of money up front in a large sum and have pretty strong residual income to keep you supported to creating other games.
I love hearing these stories... I'm just curious, I was looking at your Sparta App, and do you think 'any' of the sales were due to the name sharing its name with "Hero of Sparta"? The game looks fun, are you releasing a sequel? Was it 99 cents when it was in the top 25? What was the highest it got in the charts? and for how long? $4000 a day is incredible! I did hear some stories from other developers about massive amounts of money being made - especially from those that were #1... Surely a good way to start the development train for subsequent games rolling. Now that Eliminate is moving into the free category - its one less thing to worry about. Right now I'm worried about GTA, Rockband, Asphalt5, and Nova, and NBA muscling everyone else out of the picture. I know there is room for more than 5 top Apps... (not saying that we will be in the top 5 but it would be awesome) but its just getting really crowded!
I don't think it had to do with "Hero of Sparta" but just the idea of Sparta itself, which was made popular by the movie "300". (Hero of Sparta was released 6 months prior to Sparta) Sparta reached #10 in the AppStore and was at $.99 and for about 1 week. I'm pretty sure that Ravensword can outdo that. It has much more hype and promise than Sparta. (From a gamers perspective.) Depending on how well the game is marketed (you are with Chillingo, right?) then I wouldn't be surprised if you made over $500,000 in the first month. Also, I don't think that GTA, Asphalt 5, or NBA are in the same category as your game. If you get #1 RPG, then I'm sure you'll move through the ranks.
Very interesting thread. I am seeing the same patterns. My game did not get featured and overall had a pretty bad launch. I completely ignored creating a good icon for it at launch. Not sure what I was thinking. My game, "Earthling" is doing exactly what everyone has described. Fluctuating around the 20-30 a day mark. It has been out for only 2 weeks and I can definitely see it is not a game for everyone (as a lot of the puzzle games are). The free version gave it a nice bump, but nothing spectacular. In my opinion, being how I am mostly a one-man-show with a few people helping me out with music/graphics from time to time, I think that a happy medium for me would be to be able to make approx $2000 a month. Enough to pay rent and not have to work while being a university student. After that, it is a nice thing to put on your resume when you're out and looking for a real job. So it seems that, if one wants the "warm and fuzzy" medium of the road income that one can use to support their modest lifestyle, having multiple (but good) games in the app store is the way to go. If your app is selling 30 a day, you will need about 5 different apps to make that $100/day in sales, which will translate in $3000 per month. After Uncle Sam has his share, you are left with the resired $2000/mo result. It really isn't that hard to achieve, and you might get featured in the process which is part of the fun. Working and being a year and a half away from having a BS degree in computing is starting to get tough. I would like to ride the last year out without having to work, so I can concentrate on my studies. That's what I'm after.
That's good, but I'm aiming for the middle with alot of apps. If one of them strike gold, I ride it for as long as possible, but i just want to be able to get an okay income from all the apps I make.
Well, I think we belong to the happy medium, even if the reason is not money. The most important thing is that we have a game in the AppStore, and the possibility and willingness to submit more. Our first game - even if I think it's a quite original and demanding 3D balance puzzler - could have better sales. It took us 3 months to finish the first version of Libra, and it's in the AppStore since 27th September. We are not millionaire (yet ;-)), however I'm quite satisfied, as we got good revies and ratings. On the other hand, we have now a well designed and performant engine, which is very easy to extend further. Player reviews helped us a lot, so our upcoming games will be even better. Due to a nerving issue (many developers complained about it in the last week of september), the lite version got backdated, and dissappeared instantly after it popped up in the store. So it's promotional value was nearly zero. :-( We hope that the next update will be even more successful.
Rummage... just started to pick up My first iphone game, Rummage, has been up and down. The first week was good... ya know you hit the forums and blogs and throw around some promo codes. I make games because I love to. And I make games that I would love to play... the money and good reviews are a nice side effect. BUT, after that I was getting less the 3 paid downloads a day, which was really a kick in the nuts for all my effort. It dropped out of the Top 100 Word and Puzzles subcats into nowhere land. The Rummage 1.1 update got some attention and scored reviews from PocketGamer, NoDPad and Nine Over Ten. Since 10/14, its gone from 0 to an average of 150 downloads a day!? Its feature in the iTunes "New and Noteworthy" and climbed as high as #7 in Paid Word Games. Its already slipping a bit, down to #12 I think... I really hope is stays in that "happy medium" of the top 25 Word Games allowing to work on my next 2 titles.
